jvj

I'm struggling along trying to write at the moment, and not making huge amounts of progress. Maybe it's because I'm older, but this seems strongly at odds with when I wrote with a pen at school- everything went much quicker.

The same was true at University (though I never even draft-wrote essays). Writing on a computer was an agonising experience. Whilst I got good marks for my essays and dissertation, it took me an eternity, often just sitting at a keyboard for hours on end.

Does this correlate with other people's experience or not? And if so, do you end up writing on a computer anyway?

Writing by hand always makes me feel like I have an actual, material story coming along and not some pixels on a computer. I like crossing things out and scrawling around edges and shuffling chunks of text around by drawing a squiggly line from one paragraph across two pages beneath another. I just like it. On a computer I get distracted by the technology so the flow from the brain to the fingers just never happens quite the same; it feels choked off. When I copy the written work onto the computer though I self-edit even better and more often than not that work's about 20x better than it would have been if I wrote it straight into Word.

Writing is often a lot of sitting around trying to piece text together so it a) gets your point across, b) suits the character, c) reads well, and d) isn't a total mangling of the English language as Dr Johnson intended. Never meant to be easy, otherwise there'd be no gain, no?

The way I do it is to scrawl down phrases in a notebook when they come to me and then to flick through it when I'm stuck. Something always gets the relevant synapses firing. I should write more than I do but I'm lazy and I find blank paper scarier than blank word documents, but then I hate what I write on the computer and delete it anyway. Fail.

Phedre, have you been published yet? I ask because you always sound so professional when writing about writing. If there is a title or two out there, I would really like to get me sticky fingers on them. Or maybe you have a website where I can read snippets of your work? I would be very interested.

Hee, thank you, and thanks for asking! No I haven't - I've never actually finished a story (apart from schoolwork ones) so I don't have anything *to* publish! I've been trying to write since I was 12 but I'm too ADHD to get anywhere with any of it, usually because I find some other idea much more sparkly and interesting, drop what I'm doing and never get back to it. I do have bits and pieces of writing somewhere but they're really, really old now and don't reflect what I like to write. And yourself?

No I haven't - well not anything worth reading at any rate. I'm actually talking to my little sister at the moment about doing a childrens series. She has quite a bit of experience in book publishing, she is also quite a talented artist, but we have yet to put anything solid on paper.

Keyboard for me, definitely. Easier to edit and the way my brain works, I do that alot. Changes, rewords, adjustments. Wiping and rewriting passages.. little tweaks everywhere. It'd be an impossible mess with real paper..and I probably type faster than I write
I never liked writing longwinded stuff by hand, ever. Typing it..yea sure, no problem at all!

hmmm, with me i normally write my stories in an exercise book ( or 5!) and then fiddle around with it, sometimes ripping things out in the order i want them and putting them into folders... At the moment i am doing a whole lot of brain storming for a new story that requires a lot of shuffling and re-organising of papers into a folder, which also holds a place for a notebook i actually use to write the story in. Half the fun for me, is inventing the characters and monsters and drawing them!

though, when it comes to typing it all out, i normally give up part way through due to the tediousness of the task. Hmmm, maybe i can pay my sister to do it for me?